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Duke University Press Is an Anti-Israel Defamation Machine

Clocktower Quad at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Photo: Warren LeMay/Wikimedia Commons.

Duke University Press has recently published two journal articles that could be construed as calling for the destruction of Israel.

In 2024, the Critical Times journal, a Duke publication, printed Layal Ftouni’s article that concluded, “For a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

In April of 2025, the South Atlantic Quarterly, another Duke publication, carried an anonymous article that similarly concluded, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) explains:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an antisemitic slogan commonly featured in anti-Israel campaigns and chanted at demonstrations.

This rallying cry has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], which seek Israel’s destruction through violent means. It is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the State of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.

A doctor at the Duke School of Medicine, alarmed by these publications, told me these Duke Press articles are a form of academic support for terrorism.

In addition to calling for the destruction of Israel, the 2025 article is attributed to anonymous authors. Duke Press has essentially concealed this “scholarship” so the public can’t see who is calling for the destruction of Israel. Would Duke Press ever publish an anonymous article — or any article — calling for the violent destruction of the Palestinian-controlled territories? I highly doubt it.

The Ftouni article states: “I would like to thank the editorial team, Samera Esmeir, Susana Draper, and Ramsey McGlazer.”

All three editors are anti-Israel activists. Esmeir signed a letter “calling on scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions.” Draper and McGlazer signed a letter titled “Academics Boycott Columbia University,” stating, “We endorse and reiterate the demands of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment: divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.”

Judith Butler is a member of the Critical Times Executive Editorial Board. Butler outraged many when, according to The JC, she publicly described the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led pogrom — in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered and many others were taken hostage and sexually assaulted — as “an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack.”

In a 2023 Duke Press book, The Cunning of Gender Violence, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes:

Israeli ideology treats the colonized Palestinians as a demographic threat to be eliminated. Andrea Smith (2003) writes in her work on the sexual colonization of native peoples that the native Other is rendered “sexually violable and ‘rapeable’” within the framework of colonialism. The treatment of schoolgirls within the Israeli biopolitical colonial regime similarly can be read as constructing them not just as disposable but also penetrable ‘Others,’ especially through the use of guns.

She adds, Israelis “carry their rifles as an extension of phallic power.”

The language clearly portrays Israelis as sexual predators or sexual monsters. Given the longstanding perceived connection between Jewish people worldwide and Israel, this is even more problematic.

The book is part of a Duke Press series. The series editors are Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman.

Grewal and Kaplan both pledged in 2021 to promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel “in the classroom and on campus.”

All three editors signed a “Scholars Against the War on Palestine” 2023 letter calling for a “permanent ceasefire now,” stating, “We stand with Palestinians everywhere.” The letter relentlessly attacked Israel and did not mention — a single time — Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack, or the hundreds of hostages being held at the time by Hamas-led terrorists. Some of these hostages remain today in Gaza in horrendous conditions. The words “Hamas” and “hostages” did not even appear one time in the letter.

Such severe anti-Israel bias helps explain how Duke University Press apparently found no problem with a journal article stating that Israelis view Palestinians as rapeable.

In 2024, the Transgender Studies Quarterly journal, a Duke Press publication, published an article in which the authors explain, “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) [are] referred to by resistance movements as the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF).” The authors then immediately used the term “IOF” twice in the column. For example, the authors discuss what they call “an IOF missile ostensibly on its way to destroy lives in Gaza.”

This article makes it clear that Duke University Press is being used as part of the “resistance movement” against Israel.

Duke University Press has a long history of publishing antisemitic works. For example, “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” by Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar, published in 2017, updated blood libels against the Jewish people. She states Israel specifically targets Palestinian children to maim them and then profit from their incurred disabilities. Like other Duke University Press authors, she compares Israelis to Nazis.

In 2018, I reported that seven members of the Duke University Press Editorial Advisory Board signed initiatives related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

The Duke University Press website explains that during the peer review process, the publisher “performs an intellectual gatekeeping function, ensuring that only scholarship of the highest quality receives the imprimatur of Duke University.”

The Duke University Press peer review process is apparently a colossal failure that puts hateful, antisemitic content into the world, year after year after year.

Duke University Press is functioning at times more as an advocacy organization for promoting anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian positions than as a scholarly publisher. Perhaps Duke Press should change its name to “The Palestinian Point of View Publishing House.”

Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.

The post Duke University Press Is an Anti-Israel Defamation Machine first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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George Washington University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine for One Year

Demonstrators gather at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. on March 21, 2025 to protest the war in Gaza. Photo: Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect.

George Washington University (GW) has suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter operating on its campus until Spring 2026, punishing the group for a series of unauthorized demonstrations it held on school property last month, according to a recent report in The GW Hatchet.

The move marks one of the severest disciplinary sanctions SJP has provoked from the GW administration since it began violating rules on peaceful expression and assembly, as well as targeting school officials for harassment, following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Until next May, SJP is barred from advertising and may only convene to “complete sanctions or consult with their advisor,” according to report.

A number of SJP chapters around the country have been disbanded or suspended by university administrators over the past two years.

The gatherings in question occurred during GW’s so-called “Palestine Liberation Week,” the Hatchet added. Administrators repeatedly told SJP to “cease” the activity, but it the ignored their directives, choosing instead to charge ahead with a “teach in” and another event to which it denied an administrator access. By the time the group’s leaders were hauled before the disciplinary panel which shut it down for an entire academic year, it had racked up a bundle of additional misconduct charges for, the Hatchet said, “disorderly conduct, discrimination, and non compliance” — of which it was ultimately found not guilty.

SJP will be placed on probation for one year after its suspension is lifted, the paper continued, during which it must request and acquire prior approval for any expressive activity. Additionally, members will be required to attend “teach-ins on university policy” for “ten consecutive semesters.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, George Washington University has been a hub of extreme anti-Zionist activity that school officials have struggled to quell. A major source of the troubling conduct is SJP, which recently escalated its behavior by issuing an ominous warning to a professor who was involved in crafting a proposal to relocate Palestinians in Gaza.

“This notice is to inform you that you are hereby evicted from the premises of the George Washington University,” SJP wrote in a missive it taped to the office door of international affairs professor Joseph Pelzman, who first shared the resettlement plan with Trump’s presidential campaign in July 2024, according to an account of events he described to the podcast “America, Baby!” the following month.

Denouncing Pelzman as the “architect of genocide,” SJP added, “Pelzman’s tenure is only one pernicious symptom of the bloodthirsty Zionism permeating our campus … The proprietors of this eviction notice demand your immediate removal.”

SJP’s threat to Pelzman, an accomplished academic who has focused heavily on the Middle East region, came as the group served probation for breaking a slew of school rules during the 2023-2024 academic year — a term which saw it heap abuse on school officials, visitors to campus representing former US President Joe Biden’s administration, and African Americans. Earlier this year, SJP held a “teach-in” that commemorated the First Intifada, an outbreak of Palestinian terrorism which began in Dec. 1987 and, lasting for nearly six years, claimed the lives of scores of Israelis.

 

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post George Washington University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine for One Year first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Far-Left Antisemitism Surged 324.8% Around the World in 2024, New Report Finds

A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect

Global antisemitism surged by a staggering 108 percent in 2024 compared to the prior year, fueled largely by far-left ideology, according to a new report.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a coalition of hundreds of organizations that fight anti-Jewish bigotry around the world, has released its annual report of antisemitic incidents, identifying 6,326 total cases last year with the vast majority — 4,329, or 68.4 percent — fueled by far-left ideology, a reversal from the group’s 2022 research in which the far right dominated and the 2023 findings which found a parity between the political spectrum’s two extremes.

“We are now facing the most severe wave of antisemitism since the end of the Second World War, a phenomenon that demands urgent global attention,” the CAM report states in its introduction. “Jewish communities worldwide have been subjected to an unrelenting onslaught of violence, harassment, and systemic discrimination, fueled by a fusion of far-left, far-right, and Islamist extremism. The international failure to combat this resurgence threatens the very security and stability of Jewish life around the world.”

CAM’s researchers found that incidents motivated by far-left beliefs had increased 324.8 percent from 2023 and Islamist-centered incidents (461) jumped 54.8 percent, while far-right-driven incidents (461) had fallen 54.8 percent. CAM attributed “radicalized social movements, media disinformation campaigns, and efforts to target Jewish communities under the guise of anti-Israel activism” as the primary culprits behind the jump in leftist antisemitism. The group also stated that Islamist recruitment tactics specifically target “vulnerable individuals susceptible to radicalization.”

To explain for the drop in right-wing incidents, the report’s authors suggested that “amid widespread and intensive media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and related protests, political activity, and antisemitism – typical of far-left and Islamist circles – relatively less coverage is dedicated to far-right antisemitic incidents.”

While the report documents an increase in anti-Israel antisemitic speech, it also explains that classical antisemitism remains more likely to motivate hate crimes including vandalism, threats, and assaults.

“Far-right incidents are slightly more likely to manifest as violence and much more likely to involve vandalism than far-left incidents,” the report states, noting that 4.6 percent (21 of 461) of far-right incidents included violence or threats, compared to 3 percent (132 of 4,329) of far-left incidents. “Such trends suggest that far-right antisemites have a greater propensity than far-left antisemites to damage property or harm others,” CAM said.

Of the 6,326 total recorded incidents, 4,907 (77.6 percent) involved hate speech, 822 (13 percent) included vandalism, and 597 (9.4 percent) manifested as physical violence or threats.

The report also noted an increase of 63.7 percent in antisemitic incidents (712) which analysts could not identify with an ideology. These comprised 11.3 percent of the year’s total.

Incidents on campus also drew special attention from researchers, with 1,069 recorded at universities globally, up 120.8 percent compared to 2023 and by 198 percent compared to 2022. CAM’s analysts identified that periods with the highest incidents took place in mid-April and mid-May, correlating with when student activists’ anti-Israel protests hit their peaks.

Groups named as responsible for these demonstrations include Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). “These groups have systematically targeted Jewish students through social exclusion, harassment campaigns, and the dissemination of antisemitic propaganda disguised as political discourse,” the report states.

Researchers also offered a geographic picture of incidents, finding that 70.6 percent took place in the United States (2,553) and Western Europe (1,916). The states with the most incidents were New York (668), California (329), Washington, DC (157), Illinois (145), and Pennsylvania (142), comprising 56.4 percent of US incidents. Factors cited for these states’ higher numbers include the presence of large cities and universities.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also released an annual audit of antisemitic incidents last month, with its research focused on the US and drawing from direct reports the group had received. Researchers counted 9,354 incidents, a 5 percent increase from 2023’s 8,873 incidents, a 344 percent increase over the past five years, and an 893 percent explosion over the past 10 years.

“The rise of antisemitism in 2024 is not a historical aberration — it is a defining moment in modern history,” CAM said when announcing the report. “Without resolute action now, the world risks entering a new dark era where antisemitism is once again condoned, allowed to fester, and institutionalized. Such a process creates a downward spiral, as hate begets hate, leading to the persecution and violence that have typified the Jewish experience over the millennia.”

The post Far-Left Antisemitism Surged 324.8% Around the World in 2024, New Report Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Trump Vows to Pursue ‘Total Dismantlement’ of Iranian Nuclear Program

US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

US President Donald Trump said his goal to achieve the complete “dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program during a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Trump made the comments during a sit-down discussion anchor Kristen Welker. 

“Total dismantlement. Yes, that is all I would accept,” Trump told Welker regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The comments

The US president cautioned that the “world will be destroyed” if Tehran is able to acquire a nuclear weapon. 

I want Iran to be really successful, really great, really fantastic. The only thing they can’t have is a nuclear weapon,” Trump added. “If they want to be successful, that’s OK. I want them to be so successful.”

The president’s comments come amid increasing pressure by Republican lawmakers to clearly outline his position on whether the US should take a more forceful stand against Tehran’s nuclear program, which Western officials believe is ultimately meant to build nuclear weapons. Iran claims its nuclear activities are only for civilian energy purposes.

Trump indicated that he would accept the creation of a civilian nuclear program for Iran, echoing comments from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the White House would support giving Tehran “a pathway to a civil, peaceful nuclear program.”

Tehran has repeatedly claimed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. However, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported last year that Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade.

The UK, France, and Germany said in a statement at the time that there is no “credible civilian justification” for Iran’s recent nuclear activity, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”

Lawmakers and analysts who wish for a tough US posture toward Iran have expressed concern about the ongoing US-Iran talks to reach a nuclear deal, arguing the Trump administration has seemingly vacillated positions on Iran’s nuclear efforts.

US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff drew backlash last month when, during a Fox News interview, he suggested that Iran would be allowed to pursue a nuclear program for so-called civilian purposes, saying that Iran “does not need to enrich past 3.67 percent.” The next day, Witkoff backtracked on these remarks, writing on X/Twitter that Tehran must “stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”

Some members of the former Obama administration have expressed cautious optimism that the approach of Trump and his team to the current nuclear talks might mirror the steps they took to reach the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 deal which placed temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of major international sanctions. Trump withdrew the US from the accord during his first presidential term in 2018, arguing it was too weak and would undermine American interests.

However, many high-profile lawmakers believe that the Trump administration should aggressively pursue the complete destruction of the Iranian nuclear program, arguing that such a program poses a substantial threat not only to Israel but also to the United States. 

“We cannot negotiate with Iran. It’s time to destroy their nuclear program and neutralize the remaining capabilities of its proxies. I remain steadfast with Israel. Provide whatever is necessary to carry this out,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) posted on X/Twitter on Sunday.

Israel has been among the most vocal proponents of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arguing that the US should pursue a “Libyan option” to eliminate the possibility of Tehran acquiring a nuclear weapon by overseeing the destruction of Iran’s nuclear installations and the dismantling of equipment.

The post Trump Vows to Pursue ‘Total Dismantlement’ of Iranian Nuclear Program first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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